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Many practitioners have long claimed that entrepreneurs think
more creatively than the rest of us because they are “wired”
differently. Recently, academic researchers have begun to take
this notion seriously.

A research team of neuroscientists and business-school scholars
from Italy and Switzerland recently used an fMRI to capture
images of the brains of entrepreneurs
and managers who undertook a task that involved searching for
alternative approaches to solving a problem – something academics
call “exploration.” The researchers found that when the
entrepreneurs sought out novel courses of action, they were
more likely than the managers to use the
right side of the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with
creativity. The managers tended to use only the left side,
which is related to logical thinking.

Why did the entrepreneurs’ and managers’ brains approach the
problem differently? As one of the authors writes, the different
experiences of entrepreneurs and managers might lead them to think differently. The
types of situations that entrepreneurs routinely confront
might condition their brains to approach problem-solving
differently from managers, who regularly face different
experiences. After all, much research shows that the human
brain is highly “plastic” – it changes in response to skills
and experiences.

The Swiss-Italian research team found some evidence to support
this explanation. Managers whose jobs were less routinized tended
to approach the tasks more similarly to the entrepreneurs than
those whose jobs were more routinized.

But the entrepreneurs might approach the problem differently
because they are “hard-wired” to use creativity. As the study’s
authors’ acknowledge, people who are born with a tendency to be
creative may be more attracted to entrepreneurship than
management.

Genetics might be responsible for that “hard-wiring.” Research I
conducted with a colleague from the University of Cyprus on more
than 3,000 British twins showed the same genetic factors that
account for having a “creative personality” also make people more
likely to identify new business opportunities and to start
companies. Our earlier research showed that the same genetic
predispositions that make some people more likely than others to
seek novelty also affect their odds of being in business for
themselves. Furthermore, in research we undertook with a group of
molecular geneticists, we found that a version of one of the
genes that governs the level of dopamine in the brain, and which
is associated with the tendency to search out novelty, was more
common among entrepreneurs than non-entrepreneurs.

Hormones might be another pathway through which genetics
influence how entrepreneurs think. A 2006 study showed that men
with higher base testosterone levels were more tolerant of risk
and more likely to be entrepreneurs than men with lower base
testosterone levels. A 2011 study showed that entrepreneurs who
had been exposed to more testosterone when in utero had faster
growing firms than those who were exposed to less of the hormone.

As academics explore these questions, we will learn more about
the role that nature and nurture play in accounting for
differences between entrepreneurs and the rest of us. While
future research will no doubt show that nurture plays a
significant role, my hunch is that it will also reveal that the
intuition of many practitioners is right. Entrepreneurs are
“wired differently” from the rest of us.